


#154

by kittytastrophe



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:28:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21532240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittytastrophe/pseuds/kittytastrophe
Summary: Shuuichi thinks about the impact of fictional characters.
Relationships: Akamatsu Kaede/Saihara Shuuichi, Momota Kaito/Saihara Shuuichi, Ouma Kokichi/Saihara Shuuichi, Shirogane Tsumugi & Saihara Shuuichi
Comments: 7
Kudos: 46





	#154

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS YOUR WARNING: This fic isn't for the faint of heart. Wording is intentionally harsh and gritty in connotation. Some metaphors are grotesque. That's the point. The importance of connotation was the entire mentality used during writing this.
> 
> Written for a RP site. The site uses freeform applications, so I figured I could repurpose it for an actual fanfiction.
> 
> Please don't think I believe the other characters have no impact on Shuuichi's development; quite the opposite. I just focused on the ones I feel represent the game's themes the most. It needed this focus because a) as mentioned, it was an application for a site and I didn't want to give the moderators a novel to read and b) that would be 16 characters I'm writing about, please, I'd cry.

“Clair de Lune” by Debussy had originally been titled “Promenade Sentimentale”, or _sentimental walk_. _Andante très expressif_ — an easy pace with feeling, _pianissimo_ , very soft. It’s different from what might typically be associated with _her_ ; bombastic, bold, daring. Leaderly, aggressive. Taking a stance with confident words, steadfast belief, and one-tracked mind, easy to believe to the point of not thinking. And yet, her recommendations remained contemplative, gentle, soothing. A dichotomy like that may seem impossible, should it be anyone else to suggest it; after all, brash isn’t associated with sweet melodies, moonlight, and the reflection of glassy water shimmering with the touch of stars, instead contemplative, slow. But it’s the dream, he thinks, that made it her favorite, the way that it sings of hope tinged with sorrow and the beauty that such a marriage of those ideas brings. Music speaks primarily in metaphor, in suggestion, in the way that it carries, and with her heart so intrinsically intertwined with piano, that’s how she is too, deep down; she carried everyone away not because of the bubbling optimism, but instead the way she reached into their cores and snatched what they felt deep down that could not be described into words…much like a song.

That mishmash that Akamatsu held high so effortlessly never managed to soar with Shuuichi’s guidance, as far as he can tell. There could be a multitude of reasons for that; because no longer could he hear a tune so beautiful when the clash of keys continued to roar within his ears after her feet had been forced to slam onto them, because Shuuichi never had a discerning ear for music to begin with, because dissonance took greater claim over everything within his brain over classical, or, perhaps the part that Shuuichi least wants to consider, that the fingers playing the tune made it sound anything other than hollow. Interpretation of the piano player contained a human element that the piece by itself could not. When he glances at treble clef and Db Major and the V chord, he’s reminded firmly of the fact that the piece had not been written by her, but instead performed. Even more cynically if he tried, he could think of it as only that, a performance, orchestrated by someone else pulling puppet strings and making hands press along black and white slabs in the same manner that the noose around her neck did her body. From him, such sentiments only become cheap imitation, because it’s not what he’s made for.

He isn’t a damn pianist.

Maybe that’s why it fell apart so quickly when her wish weighed him down. Two days they lasted with nary a single consideration of any kind of break, and then, that was it. Body count growing with the cacophony of a tidal wave, staining overgrown walls with magenta; it’s not in the literal sense, but silhouettes etched of friends he’d seen alive just the day before crossed his path in the courtyard with a wave and a smile. Hers, and Amami’s, had been the first, and it’s the first that’s always the worst, they say. At the very least, the pristine white of the cement below looked that little bit redder when considering the path here would no longer be crossed by someone with the voice of command and someone with the voice of pure mystery, wisdom held behind, secrets kept under lock. A spirit summoned within he tried to keep swelling within his chest, his own bravado signified by shedding the shield that he hid behind (a hat, given to him by  ~~ his uncle a fellow detective not him was it me? was it me? ~~ so eye contact remained a rarity), only made evident to not quite be able to keep in touch when starkly contrasted by the same face, same voice, perhaps even same _name_ speaking of her lack of faith in humanity, and so it drowned, and so it drowned like everything else, in the same scent of copper.

Shrinking violet Saihara Shuuichi didn’t challenge the monochrome bear the same way she did, in such a convincing way as she had. Core values obvious, participants rallied behind her. So did he. Direct challenges even when presented with adversity made it easy enough to believe in her. Despite the formula to every word that dropped from her lips, much like a recital, it became all the more real when she was the one who said it, when she showed up on the day to be graded and she stood with nary a shake to her stance. Burned and imprinted in everyone’s mind, his especially (and perhaps that could be attributed to the incredible memory he’d been granted, but he likes to believe otherwise), her desire to befriend and draw them together wrapped them up in a warm blanket like all they’d be facing today was a particularly harsh winter, and the cold and ice that surrounded them wouldn’t permeate the hut that they strived together to build. Even when challenged by Ouma, everyone wanted to rally beside her. Inspiration drawn by her even after her loss shook all of them continued as she became the start, and so too did she become the end, like the first note of the piece to the last. 

**We’re not going to participate in some dumb killing game,** she said.

**I’m perfect for a killing game,** she also said.

And maybe she’d been right on both those counts, upon reflection. On one hand, she’d been the one to keep them together. On another, she’d been the first to plan a murder.

* * *

“The impossible is possible! All you gotta do is make it so!” If Shuuichi really thought about it, he might’ve gone as far as to suggest that he heard that one within a cheesy shounen at some point. It’s only what describes _him_ best — hot-blooded, adventurous, sights set high. If Akamatsu kept glued to the moon’s dancing upon pools, Momota’s gaze always remained above, to the stars that surrounded it, fearing none of the inky black that encase them. Limitations only exist within the mind, as he advertised over and over again; while Akamatsu remained steadfast in a particular goal, Momota honored the idea of the promotion of others’, and if listened to, one might even believe a house made of cards would not fall from the wind blowing if it tried hard enough. His sentiment better carried the lights that Akamatsu guided the blind mice with, with an unshakable belief in their capabilities, in the people they could become, and in the exercises they attempted. Shuuichi thinks sometimes that his mind could be thought of as similar to that of a galaxy, with an insurmountable amount of speckles of faith that it’d be impossible to fathom it without a telescope.

He wouldn’t know, because Shuuichi isn’t an astronaut, either.

Shuuichi stumbled more than a man with terminal illness, sheltering himself from the blinding light that the unknown seared into his skin. Even when he coughed, the Luminary of the Stars held a shaky thumbs up, ravaged by weakness. Teeth shined with organ spit spread unnaturally wide, presented with a sheen of positive delusion with little self reflection as trembling hands grappled for Shuuichi’s shirt and pulled him up. First off the bed, where he’d stared too far and considered what the tightness of the rope must’ve felt around her neck; then out of the shackles that the struggling and late Hoshi wore, whose life that Shuuichi didn’t manage to save, with consideration of suggestion that they could watch motive videos together. Where Akamatsu failed to keep them together with inspiring speeches, Momota brought them back with yet more inspiring speeches of a weaker caliber, in both the literal and the figurative sense. But of course, Shuuichi bought and ate all of it up anyway with a hunger to fill the emptiness that she left behind, with a spark that he could not truly claim as his.

They’re all dying, Shuuichi knows that, they’d all been dying as humans do, but some people die quicker than others. Late night rendezvous brought up in order to bring Shuuichi off his knees wound up with Shuuichi turning up alone, and then only with Harukawa Maki by his side. Harukawa Maki, revealed by the third class trial of this sick killing game to be especially good at the _killing_ part, and yet it’s the man ravaged with a time about to be cut short who thought he’s safest around her. Hand extended and offered to a man who didn’t (doesn’t) know what he’s living for, and a woman who probably didn’t (doesn’t) remember what she’d been killing for, and Momota decided to facilitate that kind of same confidence that he wore half clad like the splayed jacket over his arms.

Was it selflessness? Was it _selfishness_? He doesn’t know now what inspired Momota to say the things he did, to walk the way he walked, when in reality his body could not keep up with his mind, and even some parts of his mind couldn’t either. He wants to think, maybe, that it’s no deeper than Momota really believing in the both of them when neither of them could believe in themselves — and maybe it’s his own affection for someone who he once thought could be the only person he ever needs in his life after the last one left him behind, maybe it’s the fact that staticky tapes contain uniforms he doesn’t remember seeing, maybe it’s because clichés are clichés for a reason, and should be. He doesn’t know what would make the Momota he saw in those tapes want to be this kind of character in the first place.

It makes it harder to know, when words exchanged between the two of them as Shuuichi handed the guillotine to Gokuhara Gonta made it seem as though the man who peered at the skies wanted something else, a planet of make-believe that existed somewhere in a distant galaxy that humans never touched. He doesn’t think that he’d been happier at the idea that the place that they thought of as an Academy might instead have been placed on a dying, miserable planet, or the moon, or wherever the fuck it was the Flashback Lights decided the location to be besides whatever Earth was beforehand. Not that he could blame him for that particular stance, nor did he blame him for the fact that he wanted Shuuichi’s finger to return to the podium as opposed to pointing at the guy who couldn’t even remember his own crime; it’s not as if he wanted to believe either of those things in the first place. Sometimes he still doesn’t.

A man with organ failure bore his fists at the ‘headmaster’ of their killing game more than Shuuichi ever did, but as with Akamatsu, as with everyone before him, maybe he just didn’t do it when it counted.

**I wanna live! I haven’t even traveled to space yet,** he said.

**I’m gonna kill everybody and win! Once I’ve got fame and fortune, I don’t gotta worry about what’s impossible,** he also said.

Maybe all those spectating would remember the smile on Momota’s believing face as he reached heaven with a cough and the glass of the spaceship stained with his blood.

* * *

“We’re Ready to Take Your Heart” functions as a catchy calling-card, though Shuuichi wonders if Ouma would have ever really used one. The type of phantom thief his image invokes doesn’t seem to be the kind with the grand kind of societal statement; instead, he can envision him wearing a top hat with checkered patterns, much like the ones on the scarf he wore. The reference to chess, to stark contrast, to too much thought all at once at the meaning that it conveys, with ‘DICE’ itself seemingly crawled straight from a group of juvenile delinquents, carried a playful note to all of it, as if it dared examination; a magnifying glass it would bask underneath, elongating its body like that of a snake basking in the sun, taking in the radiance to hog all for itself. While Akamatsu and Momota soared in space, it remained difficult to place the area that Ouma thundered through, though the clopping of hooves suggested the ground that he rooted himself so firmly — or at least, believed to be, contrasted with the outlandish that poured from his mouth like rainbows, or roses with thorns that pricked fingers when touched. The idea that said words could be described like regurgitating a treasure chest without the key only fit him to Shuuichi when he only gave it the slightest bit of thought, since that only implied some kind of repetition; but for Ouma, effortlessly weaving narratives not through story structure but instead cutting out words for a magazine and pasting them in ways that appeared nonsensical, but there existed a cypher for, offered a better description of device. Or maybe he’d construct them with cards instead, his favorite being the ‘joker’, of hearts specifically, waved with childish abandon, and perhaps even creating no discernible pattern at all…

Simultaneously a trendsetter and breaker, the man to create the car he’d name after himself but also to blotch it with all sorts of hideous colors that somehow created a loud ensemble that made sense together when they would dissolve by themselves, he weaved a tapestry with a kind of finesse that appeared deceptively like the hands of a child. A visionary, yet simultaneously subjecting himself to ridicule for the sake of having a good laugh…

Maybe that’s the life of a leader. Or perhaps a liar.

Shuuichi could only dream of being able to imitate Shakespeare, the crassness too bold and the poetic too meandering. Points that Ouma kept straight rolled Shuuichi’s head back; still do, in fact, with a dramatic end fitting of a dramatic person. Though while there’s a kind of beauty in the utilization of lies, there exists none in the bed of a hydraulic press being soaked through to the point that Shuuichi would wonder if metal on it could truly rust. A small paper cut tended to with panicked hands and soft laughter it wasn’t; bones sawdust to the point of nonexistence, seeped into the echoing screech of the press itself, devouring Ouma’s body whole and leaving none of his remains behind save for what wasn’t even his remains at all, but instead jacket torn and punctured by arrows designed to poison the well. Such ugly fortitude exists in someone (not Shuuichi, or at least he can’t even _imagine_ ) allowing his muscles to convulse, body trying to tear itself apart, while he watches the ceiling caving in on him slowly with a foreboding inevitability, and yet would have the audacity to order his partner manning the button to _hurry up_ , because he feels he’s dying and if he takes any longer one death will earn itself faster than the other. Needing tissue or toilet paper for the amount of crocodiles whose tears he’d stolen that he decided used instead on someone else’s throat, and yet he’d do such a thing with a smile, a smile that Shuuichi bought so heavily and thoroughly and yet criticized him for, a man he taunted for accomplishing nothing while simultaneously sabotaging the remaining plan that he had that he was willing to die for…

Sometimes, Ouma didn’t even feel much like a person at all. Maybe that’s what Shuuichi uses to justify it, anyway. While he followed like a newborn lamb after those who encouraged him, he ate the breadcrumbs that Ouma spread while howling at him that they’d grown stale. Is it regret that Shuuichi has? Is it something else? Did he trust him, ever? No, the question isn’t for Shuuichi because it’s obvious what that answer is, it’s obvious where that story went and it’s obvious he closed that book before he managed to write the Spark Notes, or at least he’d done a very hackneyed job of writing them. Rather, the mystery lies in whether or not Ouma ever trusted _him_. What would he say now? That you could lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink? Shuuichi scarce spotted the puddle until after Ouma long drowned in it, discovering instead that not only had it been quicksand, but the fullest pit of quicksand to ever exist, and he’d been sinking, slowly, until Shuuichi shoved his head underneath it entirely and observed with impassivity as Ouma choked to death, fingers outstretched for him long after Shuuichi already retracted his hand.

Ouma routinely made them face the monster that lurked deep inside of them all but drew himself on paper with giant claws that he envisioned himself ripping the others to shreds with; but rather than them all bleeding, skulls exposed from the way that he dug into their heads, he’d instead draw out some kind of shining gold, potentially shaped like a ‘J’. A treasure, maybe, one might liken it to; Ouma saw potential where Shuuichi never could, enlightened to the nature of people like Shuuichi wouldn’t, and left it behind inside of a will, a motive video, and plans buried under scrawls that smiled just as brightly as he did, crayons rough and messy. Such wide eyes played fate like television and yet Shuuichi, like he always did, avoided eye contact except when it remained convenient. He hurt me, Shuuichi thinks. He hurt me.

~~ He was hurting. ~~

Gokuhara didn’t remember their plan, so who knows anymore if Ouma really wanted them all to die or not because he thought there was nothing left to live for. After all, Ouma saw that Flashback Light of a world outside ravaged. Maybe Ouma’s organs felt the same as Momota’s.

**I’m always doing stuff for everyone’s sake. I’m sure you won’t believe me when I say stuff like that,** he said.

**I don’t wanna die yet…I’m gonna survive! I’m gonna make it no matter what!** he also said.

Four chapters before he killed himself. Sorry, planned his own death. Shuuichi confuses the two.

* * *

_Memento mori_ , meaning, “Remember you must die,” isn’t meant to be grotesque in nature. It’s supposed to inspire courage in the face of the fact that life, death, its cycle, is an inevitability. Too many regrets left behind by not remembering the value of permanence, by reducing it to something that was little more than a far-off memory, distant clouds drifting within sunny sides that barely affects visibility of the blue that the white breaks apart. White and black, blonde and pink, red and purple. The sky gets like that especially during sunsets. End of a day. Repeat the cycle, over and over. Formulas, novels, tables. Repeats, repeats, repeats. Rising action, climax, falling action. Resolution. Printed and reprinted, passed on over and over, handmedowns.

But for one person, it inevitably has to end. And there are no second chances.

Shuuichi doesn’t know if he’s really the Ultimate Detective. In fact, he doesn’t know who Saihara Shuuichi even is. He doesn’t know who number 154 is, though he said it at one point, apparently. Chess, he’s played chess. Stars, he’s seen those. The moonlight, all of those familiar concepts spun together, is that who Shuuichi is? That he knows these references, that he knows what they all might mean even though he isn’t a musician, isn’t an astronaut, isn’t a leader — does that mean something? Is he a conglomerate of all of these experiences, this knowledge, trivia that wasn’t actually absorbed or that he doesn’t remember absorbing but might have been inserted directly inside of him and absorbed by his bloodstream, making up his DNA? A book somewhere, maybe, he’s read, he grasps feebly.

He’s thought about the fact that he knows what the word ‘rubble’ is when it showed along the glass dome walls that he’d been trapped in, like very large magnifying glasses whose reflection made the pinpricks of the sun’s rays burn into him like they’d caught him on fire, or otherwise that he’d caught the world around him in that same blazing inferno. That maybe he could have known it, at one point, or maybe it’s just as artificial as the rest of him is, something that’s simply there. Something that simply _is_ , or constructed into him for the sake of convenience, because the audience knew it, the audience could connect with it and we don’t want to set time aside in our story explaining it.

When he saw Shirogane at the end of that trial with ‘V3’ slashing through her irises, he wonders if he might have looked like that if he carried out any of what his own voice told him he’d said. The obsession screaming out of every orifice within her body, transforming what he assumed to be his friend into some kind of supernatural creature that exists somewhere between reality and fiction, her drooling maw hovering over his head and her ghastly breath smelling of death with all the glee of a novel’s enthusiast forcibly smashing into his nose, Shirogane became someone unrecognizable from who he thought he knew for a month. And it makes him wonder if that could technically be applied to all of the others who exist now six feet under away from remaining prying eyes but whose portraits still hovered within the destroyed remains of the school, shot down by the audience surrogate, whether he truly knew any of them at all. He relates them to colors, relates them to existing concepts that could be so abstract if someone listening to him describe it doesn’t know them, relates them to people and things that have been brewing underneath his cowlick. He relates them to these things because he wants them to be familiar, he wants them to not be forgotten.

He wants them to be as real as the things he’s comparing them to.

The evidence appears right in front of him that he knew them, that he saw them. The evidence exists within his heart that he loved them. That he still _does_. The evidence suggests, even, that at one point they existed and now they don’t.

‘Friends’. He’d called them that because Akamatsu called them that, on the very first day. She’d said they’d get out. She’d said they’d all be friends.

She thought, before she died, that she was a murderer, that she didn’t want to admit she was because they wouldn’t want to be her friend. She was innocent, and yet she died thinking that she broke someone’s skull open.

That’s what Shuuichi can count on, because he saw her dissolve into tears right in front of him, and maybe there’s a video out there that suggests someone else existed in that body for a period of time, but the person she became is the person who made him take off that hat and stop hiding from the world.

‘Sidekick’. Momota called him that, because he wanted to adopt him underneath his wing. He said that he believed in him. He argued with him, but in the end he fought for them. He said he was sorry. He smiled with lips dyed magenta.

That’s what Shuuichi can count on, because he saw him leave that Exisal after trying to trick Monokuma, and maybe there’s a video out there that suggests someone else existed in that body for a period of time, but the person he became is the person who made him believe that the impossible really _is_ possible.

Ouma…

He doesn’t know what he can count on with Ouma, other than the fact that he can, and will, always remember him. And perhaps that Ouma gave him the best advice, when he offered to go first before Shuuichi, when he cut his finger, and when Shuuichi won when he hadn’t even played — that to win the game, you’d best not play it at all. The man who taught him to lie. And the man, should he have listened, who would have taught him that lies can be kind.

It’s almost pitiable, to be Shirogane, someone who immersed herself within a fiction, knew it the entire time, and devised everything wrong that ever happened to them, within a world that’s everything wrong with them, with a team that’s everything wrong with the world. The sneer that he directed at her and the defiance for her and the audience that she played so heavily toward still exists, even to the point that she’d been willing to forward her own death. But maybe he’s just as pitiable, because he’d been so willing to allow himself to succumb to the very same thing, if it meant that the world could be free from that hell. Decimated underneath the very thing that she helped create in what was a muted death, the most muted of them all without much ensemble to accompany it, and her precious livelihood and everything she’d ever built herself around went with her.

Shuuichi doesn’t know what’s so real about him, but if there is one thing for sure, it is the feelings that he had. The love he felt for the people that he lost, the hatred that he felt for the woman who caused it, the disgust for the audience that devoured it without any hint of self-awareness… Feelings during the game and after that carried him, because although Shuuichi wasn’t sure he had much to live for, he is sure that everyone fought for him to be here today. Whether it’s a story he’d been written in or not, these people lived and breathed at one point _for him_ , and for them, he’d do the same. And he’d do the same as _Saihara Shuuichi_ , as the man who fought for them despite his gripping insecurity, as the man who’d cried when any of them departed in front of him, as the man who feverishly pursued the truth out of a mixture of curiosity and a sheer need to save them, to carry on everyone’s wishes and promises, and to hold the world dear.

Because if there’s one thing that he knows about Saihara Shuuichi, it’s that he went through a killing game… _and he won_.

**Author's Note:**

> Gotta thank a friend of mine for the Kaitou Joker reference suggestion. jestingjokers, you da man.


End file.
